‘Steel’ Show of Control : Belgian Video Artist in U.S. Debut at LACMA

Body builders pump iron to the strains of operatic arias in Marie Jo Lafontaine’s video installation at the County Museum of Art. As Maria Callas opens her mouth and releases a flood of impassioned sound, a young man tightens his jaw, bites his lip and goes for the pain.

At times emotion throbs so fervently through the black-and-white images on 27 video monitors that Lafontaine might have called her work “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Or, inspired by the narcissistic fellows who work out on camera as if they are having a religious experience, the Belgian artist might have dubbed the piece “Sylvester Stallone Finds God in the Mirror.”

But as the name “Tears of Steel” suggests, Lafontaine’s imposing wall of video monitors is neither a hymn to physical perfection nor a spoof of male vanity. It examines the compulsion to turn bodies into machines and--by extension--the drive to control human behavior.

“This work has nothing to do with muscles; it’s about the mind, the triumph of the will. It’s not about body building; it’s about power training,” Lafontaine said during an interview at the museum. While her assistant fine-tuned the complex work for last weekend’s opening, she commented on the astonishing video sculpture that captured attention last year at Documenta in Kassel, West Germany.

“There is a cult of the body. The body is the object of the cult and that frightens me,” Lafontaine said. Expressing herself emphatically but occasionally struggling with her English, the multilingual artist frequently returned to the central concept of her work: manipulation and extreme methods of control. She equates obsessive striving for physical superiority with tyranny in general--and the Third Reich’s super race in particular. One video sequence suggests a Hitler salute, a reference that Lafontaine said was unintentional but appropriate.

“Tears of Steel” is an 8-minute program that recycles for an hour. It runs through such a rich repertoire of expression that mesmerized visitors often watch it over and over, discovering something new in each viewing. Repetitive frames flicker across the field of monitors, presenting cropped images of bodies that may resemble a crucifix, a heroic sculpture or an abstract landscape. Enhanced by music, the pounding of exercise machines and--at one point--the ominous sound of bombs, the mood shifts from sensuous and erotic to narcissistic to violent.

Viewers sometimes assume that Lafontaine simply filmed three young men working out in a gym. In fact she hired actors in Marseille and served as a director, goading them into a state of exhaustion. “That one was furious with me,” she said, pointing to a man intensely concentrating on the unseen director.

“Tears of Steel” is in black and white because “color gives something that is not necessary to the image,” Lafontaine said. She built an elaborately buttressed structure for the wall of monitors as a metaphor for over-developed bodies. “If the wall didn’t have all these supports, it would fall apart,” just like a body builder deprived of his regimen.

In addition to being a video artist, Lafontaine is a painter and sculptor with an enviable exhibition record in Europe, including shows this month in Prato and Venice, Italy. The current Los Angeles exhibition is her first museum show in the United States, however, and she considers it an important breakthrough. European museums have been more generous to contemporary American artists than the other way around, she said.

This summer offers an unusually strong assortment of imported talent in Los Angeles. Lafontaine’s show (to July 24) coincides with the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibitions of works by German painter Anselm Kiefer (to Sept. 11) and French artist Christian Boltanski (July 12 to Sept. 25).

Howard Fox, who became LACMA’s curator of contemporary art three years ago, could hardly be more pleased to introduce Lafontaine to Los Angeles. “This is what I came here to do,” he beamed.

“Tears of Steel” has already received critical acclaim. If the fascinated attention of museum technicians and visitors who craned their necks to get a sneak preview is an indicator of public interest, Fox has a hit on his hands.